PR Pah! Supplemental Rubbish

[dimmer]

Has anybody ever thought about the following:-

What if Google used its own link click counters to judge a page? Put a new page in the index yeah high in the serps, then based on the amount of clicks it receives and perhaps the amount of returns to the serps for the next result, rank the page on that? Why bother with non google inbound links when they point the majority of search traffic?

Spam sites may get a click through, I know I dont follow them. Good sites with good results end my search. Its not too difficult to measure. Wow how easy would it be to rank pages on that?

I note that a lot of supplemental results are now shown, but over the last few weeks, some of them have produced the best and most pertinent results for me, some often higher than non supplemental results.

I wonder also why some of the highest reults pages on my site are linked to only by google adwords.......

Is google using its own index to rank sites and page popularity?

Who Knows, you decide!

[Quadrille]

Nice idea, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Just take a look at a few Google results.

Doesn't mean they won't do it in the future. But why would they? Since when did popularity=best?

[Bewenched]

Why would they need to count clicks .. they have the google toolbar and desktop to track everything if they wanted to. Scary to think about really. That's how Alexa gets its traffic ratings for a site.

[Halfdeck]

User clicks are being tracked -- otherwise they wouldn't bother with mouseovers and redirects, but who knows what they're doing with the data.

One obvious reason for tracking, of course, is to show clickthru stats in Google Sitemaps.

[itloc]

Oh yes.

And imagine (being Google) you are able to place AdsenseAds on these pages and some tracking scripts (Analytics).

You know then exactly how many pages a user is acessing from a certain site if he finds the site through your search.

This is one of the major elements I do take in account whenever I design a page.

Regards

itloc

[BigDave]

Is the last click the best result?

what about the case where the searcher gives up because noting met their needs, or they got sidetracked?

Have you ever price shopped for something and gone back to an earlier page that you kept open in another window because it had a better price?

Have you ever worked on a paper for school where you had to have 5 scholarly references to support your assertion? You would stop after the fifth one that meeets your needs, not the best one.

Click information is useful, but mostly for QA work, not generating the ranking of the pages.

[hvacdirect]

Perhaps the last click was the click that forced them to go to Yahoo and view fresher results from smaller sites? Would that then be a positive vote for the page when in fact it was the final and worst result that sent the searcher somewhere else to find relavent information?